The Comedy of the Cross

BY: Dominicans of the Province of St Joseph

St. Thomas contends that a man with no sense of humor is actually deficient, lacking something that ought to be present in a man fully alive. Jesus was perfectly man, so where are his casual smiles, his amused chuckles, and his belly laughs?

Some of the most popular current answers to this question seem to miss the mark, more or less widely. Some scholars apply form criticism to Jesus’ speech as recorded in the Gospels and conclude that he did in fact use comic rhetorical devices like irony, satire, puns, and sarcasm; so even if we don’t see Jesus laughing, we see him using modes of speech designed to strike others as incongruous, and perhaps even funny. Other scholars—and artists like Ralph Kozak—say that the nature of Jesus’ message surely must have led him to smile; one scholar argues that it is impossible to imagine Jesus preaching the Beatitudes without a joyous grin on his face.

A much smaller group, popularly led by religious conspiracy theorists Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, uses Gnostic texts like The Gospel of Judas to contend that Jesus did, in fact, laugh a great deal, generally as a means of signaling to the enlightened among his followers that the unenlightened had committed a spiritual gaffe through ignorance of his secret wisdom.

The first of these answers fails by excessive ingenuity. Jesus’ use of a panoply of linguistic devices makes him a skilled rhetor, not a comedian; Socrates was also known as a master ironist, but no one would call him a barrel of laughs. The second answer simply dodges the question, using the celebrated “Yes, but” defense: “Yes, the Gospels don’t record Jesus laughing, but I think he should have, so he did.” More importantly, a Jesus who could say “Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you” (Lk 6:22) with a grin on his face would seem unserious at best and cracked at worst.

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